Category: The Dish

In response to this reader, another snarks:

Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “American”, “English”, and “Chinese.” Each “nationality” is wildly diverse and contains tens of millions of individuals, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. Yet certain people seem to think – wrongly – that they “know all about” others because they know what country these people live in! Moreover, each “nationality” contains tens of millions of individuals with unique biographies.

No wait. How about: Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “Catholic,” “Protestant,” and “Sunni.” Each “religion” is …

Or, Andrew, I must take issue with your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “men,” “women,” and “transgender.” Each “gender” is …

In all seriousness, any attempt to group people in any way will oversimplify. We can examine categories, question them, add nuance to them, but it will make life a lot harder than it needs to be if we throw out all categorization of people.

Furthermore, the year you were born DOES matter. My dad was born in the 1950s. He knows what it’s like to live your life assuming the world will end, sooner rather than later, because somebody’s going to nuke somebody else. That’s formative. That’s an important shared experience with people his age. People who are just now starting college do not know what it’s like to have their entire outlook on the world changed by September 11th. That’s an important shared experience they do not share with me, because they were born later.

I actually agree that many people over-rely on the concept of generations, and those generations having specific, all-embracing traits. But it’s ludicrous to claim the events a person has and has not lived through don’t matter at all.

Another is harsher on the dissenter:

Hmm … quick to offend, almost comically haughty, insufferably condescending, prone to “humble bragging” (“(minor) historian…”), think they still “get” the younger generation, love the sound of their own voice (or prose), take shallow personal stands using their pocketbooks … yep, sounds like a Baby Boomer to me. But hey, what do I know … I’m a cynical Gen-Xer ;)

On the other hand:

I totally agree with the dissenter. I am a retired attorney, Ivy League educated, African–American, Vietnam vet, born in 1948 in Phoenix and still live there. I am a whole lot more than a “Boomer”. Unlike the dissenter, I will continue to subscribe, but constant assumptions about demographic groups really isn’t very helpful.

Another agrees:

I do hope you take the content of the dissent seriously. This is something that has needed saying for quite some time now. Out of so many strengths in your writing, this is one of your most unfortunate weaknesses.

Another makes the same basic argument as the first reader but with sources:

As a doctoral candidate in history who has found generational theory reasonably helpful in understanding U.S. history, I have three brief points to make about the dissent against generation labels:

First, of course these generational descriptors are over-generalizations misused by the authors of op-eds. So are groupings of people based on race, class, and/or gender. The art of history is the art of generalizing without messing up the overall picture too badly. The core question is whether the big picture can tell us anything useful, not whether it’s a perfect description of every individual in the group.

Second, much of generational theory these days comes from the work of Bill Strauss and Neil Howe (who are mentioned in this Dish post from 2008 on Obama as an Xer). Their main argument is that despite the diversity of individual experience and core traits, generations and cohort subsets within them develop general characteristics for their interactions with other generations. Furthermore,  these interactions with other generations help make the whole thing roughly cyclical as the generation coming of age rushes to fill the public role they see as absent. (The Wikipedia page has a pretty good overview.)

Finally, historians discover over and over again how much formative experiences from a person’s youth shapes their later attitudes. As Howe put it, history is not “a seamless row of 55-year-old leaders who always tend to think and behave the same way.” While it would be a little silly to make a big fuss over whether someone was born in 1946 vs. 1947, an American born to white, middle-class parents in 1946 is much more likely to be (or have been) socially liberal than someone born to similar parents in 1955. In the same vein, coming of age during the Red Scare of 1919-1920 (when government officials were targeted by mail bombs) makes the ambitious and zealous in the group more likely to use fear of Communism as a path to national notoriety once they’re of an age to do so. See Nixon, Richard and McCarthy, Joe.

Something that I find striking is that when Strauss and Howe first started writing in the 1990s, many saw their prediction of a “crisis mentality” starting somewhere between 2005 and 2008 as being “overly grim.” Also, the dissenter focusing their dissent on each person having a “unique biography”: classic Boomer. A core Millennial is likely to think “yeah, we’re all on the same team.” An Xer “but does it work?” And chances are, like the Silents before them, today’s Homeland children will grow up to (largely) think, “how do we take care of the individuals in the team?” Each generation has their strengths and their weaknesses.

Granted, I’m an early-wave Millennial (1983) who has now given up on the dogmatic religious faith of my teens, along with any trust I had in Wall Street to manage my money, or any desire to support a leader promising a “quick and easy” war that had to be fought “because”, so what do I know?

Update from the original dissenter, who gets the last word:

In response to the first critic you cited, I would say that “generational” descriptors are perhaps the least coherent and most ill-defined ones commonly used. Being an American, for example, is associated with a set of generally recognized symbols. It also carries a legally-defined status. No such generally recognized symbols or statuses are associated with so-called “generations”. (If there are, I must have missed the meetings.)

In a religious group, there are definable sets of beliefs that its adherents presumably have. There are no such definable sets of beliefs in regard to “generations”. “Generational” descriptors are the least accurate ones that exist, in my view.

And no, I don’t want the examination of other humans to be easier, and I don’t mind if I have to work at knowing other people. It shouldn’t be easy to know other humans. The desire to make it easy is part of the problem. We always need to go deeper than these broad categorical definitions. The trouble with such terms as “Baby Boomer”, “Gen-Xer”, and “Millennial” is that too often it isn’t where people begin their examination of others – it’s where they end it.

Finally, I know this will be a shock to my critic here, but after the invention of nuclear weapons, almost everyone felt some level of threat because of them. In many ways it was more jarring, I think, to be in the middle of one’s life and realize that humanity could now be wiped out in a single day, and that our enemies had the capacity to destroy us. Why does this critic think Cold War hysteria in the U.S. reached such berserk levels in the 1950s?

In response to the second critic, I’ve been angered by this “Baby Boomer” nonsense for years. Yes, I do take offense at being called locust. Yes, I do take offense at being blamed for every problem by people who don’t know me. What normal person wouldn’t be? As far as understanding younger people, I taught school for several decades and I have hundreds of friends in their 20s and 30s. We seem to understand each other pretty well. I am a minor historian, and am currently working on a five-volume deep history of the world. (Volume One is finished.) Since the critic is a “Gen-Xer”, does that mean that he or she is not only cynical but shallow, underachieving, lazy, and prone to blame others for his or her problems? Just wanted to know, inasmuch as this person has decided to use stereotypes to describe me.

Finally, in my opinion the work of Strauss and Howe is deeply misleading. Only sophisticated polling and surveying done by qualified social scientists can reveal the full complexity of social attitudes. And what do we find when we do such surveying? We find that people have a great deal in common with each other. We find that people tend to respond in very similar ways to the outside world, and that everyone filters reality through an individual mindset. Of course it matters when people are born, but it is not determinative to the degree many think it is. How does the author who cites Strauss and Howe KNOW what a “classic Boomer” is? What survey data is this view based on? How does he/she KNOW what a “core Millennial” thinks? Again, what is the evidence here?

Human history unfolds for a multitude of reasons. There are countless variables that affect it. Ascribing huge changes to the attitudes of so called “typical” generation members can only lead us down a dead end of incomprehension and mistaken conclusions. History is not only the story of change; it is also the story of continuities, and the things all of us share – regardless of how old we are.

Zadie Smith revisits J.G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel Crash, which, like the David Cronenberg movie it inspired, features characters who get off on car crashes. She writes that the “real shock of Crash is not that people have sex in or near cars, but that technology has entered into even our most intimate human relations”:

When Ballard called Crash “the first pornographic novel based on technology,” he referred not only to a certain kind of content but to pornography as an organizing principle, perhaps the purest example of humans “asking for the use.” In Crash, though, the distinction between humans and things has become too small to be meaningful. In effect things are using things. … Crash is an existential book about how everybody uses everything. How everything uses everybody. And yet it is not a hopeless vision:

The silence continued. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.

In Ballard’s work there is always this mix of futuristic dread and excitement, a sweet spot where dystopia and utopia converge. For we cannot say we haven’t got precisely what we dreamed of, what we always wanted, so badly. The dreams have arrived, all of them: instantaneous, global communication, virtual immersion, biotechnology. These were the dreams. And calm and curious, pointing out every new convergence, Ballard reminds us that dreams are often perverse.

Carlin Flora delves into the complicated world of praise studies, which investigate how children react to adult feedback. She cites a study published earlier this year that shows that “overpraise (That’s incredibly beautiful! versus That’s nice!) can be harmful for children with low-esteem, but be helpful for those with high self-esteem”:

First, the study confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that parents would be more likely to overpraise children with low self-esteem than those with high self-esteem. …

[T]hey had children between the ages of eight and 12, all previously rated for self-esteem, visit an art museum. The children were asked to paint pictures, which were then critiqued by a supposed ‘professional painter’. As a final step, they were asked whether they wanted to attempt a second, more difficult drawing exercise or a relatively easy one. All children receiving inflated praise viewed that praise as sincere, regardless of their level of self-esteem. Yet as predicted, children with low self-esteem who received inflated praise were less likely to accept the difficult challenge than their counterparts who received non-inflated praise. On the other hand, children with high self-esteem who received inflated praise were more likely to choose the challenging task than their counterparts who received non-inflated praise.

It makes sense, since people with high self-esteem are generally self-promoting and seek out situations to demonstrate their abilities, while those with low self-esteem are afraid of failure and avoid situations that might reveal their worthlessness. The authors write: ‘Thus, inflated praise can cause children with low self-esteem to avoid crucial learning experiences – a process that may eventually undermine their learning and performance.’ Here’s the complicated flip-side, though: ‘Non-inflated praise may reduce fear of failure for children with low self-esteem and thus foster their challenge-seeking, but it might fail to provide sufficient impetus to seek challenges for children with high self-esteem.’

The answer isn’t what you’re thinking:

In June, Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace published the annual Fragile States Index, which analyzed the social, economic, and political stability of countries across the globe. But the list may have left out one particularly unstable region: the ocean. According to former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, the 65 percent of the ocean that lies beyond the territorial waters of nations should now be considered “a failed state.”

“Here, beyond the jurisdiction of any government, lie the high seas,” Miliband said in an email, “where governance and policing are effectively non-existent and anarchy rules the waves.” Echoing Miliband, Carl Safina, founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute (now called the Safina Center), an environmental advocacy organization, called the ocean “a pre-state apocalypse. It is like the Wild West in the Space Age.”

The report portrays an ecosystem in crisis.

Fish stocks are being rapidly depleted. Half of the world’s coral reefs have already died, victims of rising water temperatures and ocean acidity. And according to the report: “[U]p to 60% of ocean species could be extinct by 2050 if climate change is not urgently addressed.”

It is not that global standards purportedly meant to protect marine life do not exist. Rather, they are largely toothless. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which establishes generalized guidelines for the management of marine resources, lacks enforcement mechanisms. Even now, 20 years after the convention was established, the United States and several other countries have not yet ratified the treaty, which means they are not legally bound to its principles. …

In the absence of capacity or will to enforce legal standards, the ocean’s plunder has accelerated. Underage fish are being taken both in and out of season, catches are underreported, no-fish zones are violated, and quotas are routinely ignored. Indiscriminate fishing practices are laying waste to whole fish populations and even underwater ecosystems.

Rebecca Traister is thrilled by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s rise to meme-hood:

Throughout history, we have acknowledged male strength, especially in its seniority, as serious and authoritative. Older women, on the other hand, have existed mostly as nanas, bubbes! Those sturdy, ambitious souls who also staked claims to public eminence were cast as problematic; tough ladies who no longer slide easily into Lycra are ball-busters, nut-crackers, and bitches.

Overriding these entrenched assumptions has been nearly impossible, even in the hundred years since women have had the vote, and in the 60 years [sic] since the feminist revolution of the ’70s. Recall that just six years ago, there was simply no popular script available to positively convey then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s identity as a strong and ambitious politician. … It was in those same years that Justice Ginsburg was barbecuing the court’s decision to uphold the partial-birth abortion ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, furiously pointing out that the protection of reproductive rights is not about “some vague or generalized notion of privacy” but rather about “a woman’s autonomy to decide for herself her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

Back then, when Twitter was just taking off and Tumblr was being launched, and we still were relying on a largely centralized media to bring us our news, there was no one who set those words to music (though there should have been). Now, mercifully – finally – young people who are creating a new vocabulary, a library of visual and aural iconography that warmly appreciates female power in not just its nubile, but also its senior, its brainy, its furious, and its professionally brawny forms.

(Image via Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious R.B.G. tumblr)

A reader takes a stand:

There are a lot of great things about The Dish, and I was happy to be part of the initial subscription wave. But you just reminded me again why I refuse to re-subscribe. It is your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “Baby Boomer”, “Gen X”, and “Millennials”.  These terms are utter nonsense. They are preposterous, deeply-misleading sweeping generalizations, grotesque caricatures of reality. There is no such thing as a so-called “generation” except in the strictest biological/anthropological sense, within kinship lines. The use of such terms as social descriptors has been a disaster for our discourse. (One need only look at the wave of idiotic “generation” articles pouring out of Salon for confirmation of this.)

You say every issue is discussed on The Dish? This one evidently can’t be. I have never seen any discussion challenging the ludicrous concept of “generational traits”. That seems to be strictly off-limits.

These so-called “generations” you assert the existence of cannot be defined coherently.

Each “generation” is wildly diverse and contains tens of millions of individuals, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. Yet certain people seem to think – wrongly – that they “know all about” others because they know what year these people were born in!Moreover, each “generation” contains tens of millions of individuals with unique biographies. (And yes I do need to emphasize that.) These individuals have interacted with a whole host of other humans, very many of them of other so-called “generations”, in deeply complex patterns of reciprocity. These individuals have been shaped by the whole of the human biological and cultural inheritance. They did not grow up in some sort of generational isolation box. Please stop slapping labels on them, as if they were figures in a bad editorial cartoon.

As a former history teacher and (minor) historian, it almost makes me grimace when I see such terms used to explain the nature of human society. Nothing could be more misleading. It’s as if we asked a 10 year-old how we can explain human history and society and he replied, “Well, it all depends on what year you were born in. That’s what makes you what you are. People born in 1944 are WAY different than people born in 1946. People born in 1957 are WAY different than people born in 1965.” We’d smile at such childishness – and then watch as a lot of adults make exactly the same childish arguments. It’s time to put away this childish nonsense.

I guess since I was born in 1952 and am routinely lumped together with 76 million other Americans as a so-called “Baby Boomer” that I am more sensitive to this phenomenon. In Esquire magazine, Paul Begala called people like me “locusts”. (I’d like to see Begala call my 59-year-old wife, a woman who has borne inconceivable burdens in her life and shown heroism on many occasions, a locust to my face. He would regret it.) The Atlantic said that people like me “ruined everything”, thus casually negating the lives and careers of millions of dedicated individuals. (Let’s Dick Cheney, born in 1941, off the hook, too.)  Imagine such descriptions being made about a group other than the so-called “Baby Boomers”. What kind of speech would they be considered? (BTW, I’m sick and tired of insults, not by you, directed toward the so-called “Millennials”. A lot of my 20-something former students are my friends.)

I want to be judged for my own successes and failures. Please stop assuming you know me, Andrew: you don’t. Please stop assuming that I’m just like everyone else in some mythical, arbitrarily-defined group that supposedly encompasses everyone born between 1946 and 1964. I’m not. OK? When you’re ready to do that, I’ll be ready to come back.